Every year, the League is honoured to induct new Life Members into our ranks. Life Members are selected for their incredible contribution to poets and poetry in Canada, and the award is presented as a mark of distinction and appreciation for special achievements.

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2018: Marilyn Dumont

Marilyn Dumont‘s A Really Good Brown Girl won the 1997 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. This collection is now a Brick Books Classic and in French translation from Les editions Hannenorak Press. Her second collection, green girl dreams Mountains, won the 2001 Stephan G. Stephansson Award from the Writer’s Guild of Alberta. Her third collection, that tongued belonging, won the 2007 McNally Robinson Aboriginal Poetry and Aboriginal Book of the Year. The Pemmican Eaters was published by ECW Press, 2015. Marilyn has been the Writer-in-Residence at the Edmonton Public Library, the Universities of Alberta, Brandon, Grant MacEwan, Toronto-Massey College, and Windsor. She has been faculty at the Banff Centre – Writing with Style and Wired Writing and advised and mentored in the Aboriginal Emerging Writers’ Program.

Marilyn was the lecturer for the League’s 2017 Anne Szumigalski lecture, where she presented a beautiful and powerful lecture about the recent history and influence of Indigenous women poets in Canada. “The writing of Indigenous women writers has sustained me through difficult early years,” she wrote in her lecture—“Indigenous women writers have helped me heal the colonial wound with their stories.” The League is honoured to have Marilyn Dumont as a member, a writer who has seamlessly joined the ranks of the women who so inspired her, and is proud to celebrate her this year with the life membership award.